


Orphée et Eurydice

by LiterallyAViking



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Childhood, Gen, Pianist Semi Eita, Related to Mélodie for Piano Solo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-17 21:00:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9344270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiterallyAViking/pseuds/LiterallyAViking
Summary: Semi Eita fell in love with the piano at the young age of six.





	

Semi Eita fell in love with the piano at the young age of six in a small cabin nestled deep within the Finnish wilderness. He hadn't gone to the house seeking music, instead going purely to make his mother happy, but rather than boredom he had grasped onto passion. Still with his face tucked in his thick, knitted scarf, his eyes had widened as he watched the man's hands soar over the keys, each note its own song in Eita's eyes.

Once his shoes were shucked off at the front door of the cabin, he had padded over to the piano, watching in fascination as the man made the instrument sing, the music coming purely from his head as he played on. A quiet gasp of amazement had escaped him as the man sped up, his fingers dancing a complicated tango that made the young boy dizzy just to watch. Still, he was beyond hypnotized as the man danced on.

"Seems you've got a little admirer, Heikki," a voice brayed from behind Eita, making him jump out of his trance just as the man sitting before the piano slowly spun about in his seat, his eyes passing right over Eita's bright red face to instead gesture obscenely at whoever had called out from before. Eita could feel his face dying itself even brighter as he bashfully glanced away from the action, remembering his mother's reprimands of such shows.

The man then spun about to glance down as Eita, an attempt at a smile on his face as he did. Eita could feel his own lips peeling into an awkward smile from behind his thick scarf. He burrowed his head deeper into the warmth and quickly averted his eyes from the man's gaze, embarrassed for getting caught despite the fact that that was most likely the reason he had been playing. He had wanted to get caught, or else he would not have played out in the open where anyone, namely Eita, could sneak up on him and listen.

"You like the music?" He asked, voice gruff as one of his fingers came down to play at one of the keys, the song of the single note singing out as he did. He was Russian, Eita noted as he spoke, but his Finnish was much better than Eita's own attempts at the man's native language, much to the boy's teacher's distress.

Eita felt himself nod mutely at the answer, face full of awe as he stared up at the man above him. The man pushed himself over on the red cushioned bench he was seated at and patted the now open space next to him as if to say 'come up here, boy.' Eita blinked once, twice, before following the man's directions and awkwardly swinging himself up onto the bench to peer over the keys that reminded him of the films his mother liked to watch whenever she had friends from Gymnasium over to their house.

He turned from the movie come to life to the man's face and back again, picking his hands up like he had seen the man do before and gently setting them down on the keys, not enough to make a noise, but just enough to push them down slightly with the weight of his tiny fingers.

The man laughed deeply, a smile breaking through his face as he, too, set his fingers down on the keys. He slowly reached over to take Eita's in his own and began to show him the works of the piano that the young boy would eventually grow to love with a passion that nothing else could rival.

\---

His teacher was from Sweden and hid her hair beneath a colorful headscarf and, while she didn't speak a word of Finnish, she was fluent in more languages than Eita was and was more than happy to teach him just as she taught him how to play the piano like it was a language of its own. 'Really,' his teacher had told him one day in stunted Finnish as Eita skillfully fingered through a piece that he was proud to say was beyond his age, 'Music is a great big language that we all hear, but few understand. This piano is a…it is just another form of that same big language.'

As he learnt the notes that splattered across the piano, slowly learning how to paint his own legacy across this masterpiece that so many had drawn over, he learnt many more things from his teacher. He learnt that _hjälte_ meant hero in Swedish and that his teacher liked to talk about her boyfriend using that word, and that _mourih_ meant comfortable in Arabic and that his teacher loved to use it to describe how she felt with the piano by her side. Then he learnt his teacher didn't like her dad because he had told her _en lögn_ and that he was _skämmas_ of her because she had run off with her _hjälte_ instead of the _hjälte_ that her father wanted her to have.

Languages came easier to the young boy than any other school subject. Math was hard and confusing and science was boring. Religion was tedious and history was tiring. Soon enough, he would happily run around the school shouting out answers in Swedish or Arabic or Russian or Italian or any other language than the one that they wanted him to answer in.

But still, no matter how much he tried, he never could perfect the big language of music with his mouth, only with his fingers when he set them gently on the piano and allowed them to say the words that simply couldn't be said in any language other than the one he carved out with his fingers.

\---

At the meager age of ten, Eita was considered a prodigy through the music world. The next Mozart, his mother liked to claim whenever Eita sat at the small, out of tune piano that they had only just managed to buy three years ago.

While Eita didn't know anything about Mozart's mother, he knew about Beethoven's, and at the moment he felt like the next Beethoven as he watched his mother get worse and worse, her skin wearing away to nothing more than a pale bed sheet and her hair thinning out to nothing more than threads to what had once been thick strings of yarn.

It was during one of Eita's solo concerts that his mother collapsed and he was sent off to a foreign country to live with his cousin whom he had never heard of, much less met, while his mother slowly deteriorated off in a hospital in America that he had not been allowed to go to.

Naomi was the man's name, and he was in his second year of University studying to be a playwright or something of the sort. He lived in a small apartment that only just passed as a two bedroom and was littered with clothes and empty bags. Glancing around, the only furniture he had was a rickety old couch and a scuffed black table accompanied with two broken chairs and piled high with garbage thick enough to swim through.

Eita's arms, overflowing with note stained pieces, tightened around the pages. Tears pricked at his eyes for what felt like the first time as he burrowed himself into the futon that Naomi had given him, telling him that he was free to sleep with him if he needed to. The man told him he knew what it was like to lose a mother and that he would be there to support the young boy in any way possible.

 _Bring me home_ , he almost said, _let me dive back into my language so I can tell her all the things I never said._

**Author's Note:**

> kill me plz and thx
> 
> talk to me about my son on tumblet-dot-corn at LiterallyAViking


End file.
